First Arab woman to graduate from NASA shoots for the Moon

Houston – AFP

Like her ancestors before her, Emirati astronaut Nora AlMatrooshi has spent much of her life gazing up at the stars and dreaming of flying to the Moon. This week, she became the first Arab woman to graduate from NASA’s training program, ready to blast off into the cosmos.

AlMatrooshi, 31, was one of two astronaut candidates chosen by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) in 2021 to enroll in a training program with the US space agency NASA. “I want to push humanity further than it’s ever been before. I want humanity to go back to the Moon, and I want humanity to go further beyond the Moon,” she shares.

“I think becoming an astronaut is hard regardless of what your religion or what your background is. So I don’t think being a Muslim made it harder. But being a Muslim made me aware of the contributions of my ancestors, of the Muslim scholars and scientists that came before me that were studying the stars. And me becoming an astronaut is just building on that legacy of what they started a thousand, thousands years ago,” AlMatrooshi says.

“NASA has been very accommodating to any requirements that we have. During Ramadan, Muslims fast typically from sunrise to sunset and they’ve been accommodating of that. Like, any type of extremely rigorous training that requires a lot of physical effort was either pushed earlier in the day or was postponed to after Ramadan,” she adds.

“The material that goes into the EMU suit (spacesuit) it has to be very specific material. So the suit engineers ended up sewing a makeshift hijab for me to wear. I could put it on, get into the suit and then put on the com cap and then take it off and my hair would be covered. So I really, really appreciate them doing that for me,” says AlMatrooshi.